It’s absolutely a hoax. I only first learned of it the other day, but there’s no question that if we haven’t decoded it by now, it’s not a real language.
All evidence suggests it was created in the first decades of the 1400s by several scribes. It would have taken weeks to write, and probably a year to finalize including the illustrations. The materials and labour cost would have been rather expensive at the time. It could still be a hoax, but it’s a very old and elaborate one in that case.
It is, however, incredibly unlikely that the text itself is a natural language. That much is widely agreed among experts. The big question is whether the text contains meaningful information at all. Is it a conlang, an elaborate code or is it a nonsense text generated through a series of rules and mechanisms that merely visually imitates language?
Earlier statistical analysis had shown it had some definite similarities to a real human language, it’s not just gibberish or an amateur hoax. I have to say I’m a little bit sad that it seems like it’s turning out it was just sophisticated gibberish.
It’s still completely up in the air, and as I said above: paradoxical. Voynichese doesn’t behave like any known language, and has several problems besides just entropy. On the other hand it obeys Zipf’s Law, and topic analysis indicates the content of the writing varies with the subject matter of the pages, like a real language would.
It’s absolutely a hoax. I only first learned of it the other day, but there’s no question that if we haven’t decoded it by now, it’s not a real language.
Edit: changed a typo from decided to decoded.
deleted by creator
All evidence suggests it was created in the first decades of the 1400s by several scribes. It would have taken weeks to write, and probably a year to finalize including the illustrations. The materials and labour cost would have been rather expensive at the time. It could still be a hoax, but it’s a very old and elaborate one in that case.
It is, however, incredibly unlikely that the text itself is a natural language. That much is widely agreed among experts. The big question is whether the text contains meaningful information at all. Is it a conlang, an elaborate code or is it a nonsense text generated through a series of rules and mechanisms that merely visually imitates language?
Earlier statistical analysis had shown it had some definite similarities to a real human language, it’s not just gibberish or an amateur hoax. I have to say I’m a little bit sad that it seems like it’s turning out it was just sophisticated gibberish.
It’s still completely up in the air, and as I said above: paradoxical. Voynichese doesn’t behave like any known language, and has several problems besides just entropy. On the other hand it obeys Zipf’s Law, and topic analysis indicates the content of the writing varies with the subject matter of the pages, like a real language would.